If you've got the option of putting in solar hot water, that will probably make a bit of difference to your power bills again. Solar hot water is one of the more reliable technologies as far as paying for itself goes. How much difference I don't know - haven't hunted up Cooma's insolation and climate details yet. But if you currently have a storage hot water system that is running on electric, then that will be chewing a fair bit of power that you can avoid using.
It's definitely worth shifting the hot water over before you (one day in the future) move off-grid, both for total power consumption and also for the instantaneous total power draw. The instantaneous draw is the limiting factor of most systems - how much you can have running at once - and it's quite possible to short an off-grid solar system by (e.g.) running a washing machine that heats its own water because the draw goes up too high. If your hot water is constantly taking up half your available draw, that means you can't run other things even though you have enough power in the batteries to do so.
(I may be telling you stuff you already know here, can't remember. Sorry!)
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Date: 2011-02-02 05:19 am (UTC)It's definitely worth shifting the hot water over before you (one day in the future) move off-grid, both for total power consumption and also for the instantaneous total power draw. The instantaneous draw is the limiting factor of most systems - how much you can have running at once - and it's quite possible to short an off-grid solar system by (e.g.) running a washing machine that heats its own water because the draw goes up too high. If your hot water is constantly taking up half your available draw, that means you can't run other things even though you have enough power in the batteries to do so.
(I may be telling you stuff you already know here, can't remember. Sorry!)